It's long been said that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, what if the electric motorbike straddled by the child takes him far, far away from the village?
Affordable electric bicycles and legally suspect electric motorbikes have spawned groups of young riders causing havoc in communities all around the country.
In Canberra and Wollongong last week, groups of children - believed to be as young as 10 or 12 years old - damaged sporting fields, disrupted soccer matches and harassed a women's history walking tour.
Other towns and cities have also had their own concerns about kids riding what are essentially motorbikes years before they're eligible for a licence. In several tragic cases around the nation, children have died while riding or killed or hurt others. Understandably, many are wondering what role parents are playing in these young people's lives.
We should remember the desire for teenagers to form groups and get up to mischief is not new. Indeed, we can recall the BMX boom of the early 1980s, which gave many kids a new way to rebel.
When too many children today are spending their days indoors, enthralled by their mobile phones, the idea of them being out and about exploring has a certain old-fashioned appeal. But electric bikes have supercharged both mobility and rebellion, giving kids who might ordinarily live too far away from each other the chance to easily meet up in big numbers.
As these children's radius of where they can explore outside the home has grown dramatically, parents need to adjust their span of supervision.
For some, technology will, ironically, be the answer to this issue of supervision. Tracking apps can give parents reassurance about their children's whereabouts. But there is a huge difference between knowing where your child is and what they're doing.
The answer to this dilemma - and it is not limited just to kids on bikes - may be in setting clearer expectations about planned itineraries, and how many people a child might be allowed to meet with. No matter what age, children do better when they have boundaries set around their behaviour - and a sense of consequences.
All of us should remember we were kids once, too. The sense of freedom that comes with leaving the home, and the thrill of riding a bike fast, should not elude our imaginations. In understanding the enjoyment kids seek, we should also consider if there are enough avenues for them to find it.
Do our local communities have enough bike tracks and open spaces to reduce the temptation to tear around a golf course, for example?
But it would be naive to think that providing more acceptable diversions would alone fix the issue. Children and young teenagers need adults to keep an eye on them, and if that can't physically be a parent, it can be a community.
If a sporting club or a local community raises a concern about anti-social behaviour, the response should not be "that's not my kid", but rather a willingness to look into the matter together.
Parents need to be open to the fact that good kids can be led astray, whether on a bike or online or in any other way. "No Mum, I wouldn't do that," needs to be met with a reasonable but sceptical eye.
So yes, the village can and should play a role. But as progressive laws have increased the age of criminal responsibility in many parts of the country, parents have to step up.
The best people to set a child's boundary are the people entrusted to love and care for them. Not the police.
